Elizabeth Economy

Elizabeth Economy News

In the biggest expansion of economic freedoms since at least the 1990s, China’s leaders vowed to expand farmers’ land rights, loosen the one-child policy and encourage private investment in state businesses.

At least 19 countries will be absent from today’s ceremony bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in the wake of his government’s campaign to portray the award as a western effort to undermine its authority.

Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong’s Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can’t stand the canal’s smell.

Ian Chen recalls his father quietly accepting he could no longer wade into a lake near their home in southern China where he’d swum his whole life. The raw sewage and agricultural waste spilling into the water meant it wasn’t safe anymore.

Vice President Joe Biden took a detour through Mongolia today en route from China to Japan to show support for the country’s nascent democracy and thank the government for sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Johnson Controls Inc., named by Shanghai as the primary source in a lead-poisoning case last year, said it “disagrees” with any link between its plant in the city and the incident that sickened 49 children.

Vice President Joe Biden repeated a message of reassurance to the Chinese that their investment in U.S. Treasuries is safe, and introduced a fresh warning to Chinese leaders that curtailing freedoms in Asia’s largest economy could hinder growth and stifle innovation.